No one in his day was better at downplaying the prospects of his own team than the great Bill Dooley.

The former North Carolina and Wake Forest football coach could come up with 100 reasons why his players weren’t good enough in a particular season while making any opponent sound like a national championship contender. All in the name of keeping fans and the media from getting too carried away with their expectations.

It’s a result N.C. State’s Mark Gottfried won’t have to work as hard to achieve while tempering enthusiasm in his Wolfpack basketball team this season.

He’s apparently got others doing the job for him.

“I go to the grocery store and the guy (there) says ‘hang in coach. It’s going to be a long year,’” Gottfried said earlier this week at his annual summer press conference. “I hear it everywhere I go.”

Gottfried doesn’t necessary subscribe to the doomsday projections, adding that perhaps the Wolfpack will be “a team that can surprise some people” in 2013-14.

But considering the beating he and his team took last season after it was picked to win the ACC and ranked among the top five in the nation before ever playing a game, he’s not in any hurry to quiet the naysayers, either.

State ended up winning 24 games, finishing with a double-digit league wins and earning a second straight trip to the NCAA tournament. But even that wasn’t enough to keep Gottfried’s former colleagues at ESPN from branding the Wolfpack as college basketball’s most egregious underachiever.

The veteran coach won’t have to worry about such dispersions this time around.

Instead of fielding a team loaded with four returning starters and three incoming McDonald’s All-Americas as he did a year ago, Gottfried’s current squad will be so inexperienced that two of the five veterans on the roster – LSU transfer Ralston Turner and former JUCO Desmond Lee – have yet to play their first game for the program.

Between that collective youth and the added challenge presented by the addition of perennial NCAA tournament teams Syracuse, Pittsburgh and Notre Dame into the ACC, State won’t have to do nearly as much to convince people it had a successful season.

Not that Gottfried is setting the bar as low as everyone else.

He’s put together a challenging nonconference schedule that includes road games against Cincinnati and Tennessee, and a home date with Missouri to enhance the Wolfpack’s chances on Selection Sunday “just in case “we’re fortunate to get good.”

Not even Gottfried is sure at this point what it will take for that to happen. There are too many variables at play to know where to start.

Page 2 of 2 - Can sophomore forward T.J. Warren become a consistently dominant force while learning, in his coach’s words, to be “as interested in his defensive and rebounding as he is scoring?”

Will Turner live up to his advance billing as a potential star on the wing? How long will it take Lee to adjust to the higher level of competition? Who will emerge as the team’s leaders? Will this year’s team learn to play defense better than their predecessors? Can point guards Tyler Lewis and Cat Barber learn to coexist in the same backcourt? Will fifth-year center Jordan Vandenberg finally be able to make a significant contribution? And if not, can one of three untested big men – Beejay Anya, Lennard Freeman and Kyle Washington – develop fast enough to fill the void?

“Our program is certainly in transition,” Gottfried said. “At the same time, we’re excited about where we can get to one day. How quick that is? I don’t know. We’ll see.

“I understand we have a long ways to go to be competitive. But we’re excited about (the challenge).”

How much the young Wolfpack learns and retains from its organized summer workouts, which began last Tuesday, will likely go a long way toward determining whether or not it will live down to its lowered expectations. Or do enough to exceed them.

Either way, it won’t have to worry about being called an underachiever.

You can reach ACC Insider Brett Friedlander can be reached at starnewsacc@gmail.com or at Twitter.com/starnewsacc